The Melting World

Just ten minutes from our beach home, we saw the lusher greens of the north shore of Kaua’i, as the rain falls heaviest in the mountain rainforest in the distance. Below the mountains lie the taro fields.

On a dead-end road, we looked out over this majestic scene.

We just returned from a short stay in Kaua’i and now back among the snow tunnels and crisp blue skies of Hokkaido. The relentless roar of the ocean, the lush variation of tropical greens, the smell of citronella candles and the taste of fresh coconut meat linger inside me and I find it hard to […]

Except for the atonal clanging and hissing of the ancient radiator and the hum of the electric fan heater and an inexplicable alarm’s buzzer (twice in three hours it has gone off for less than three seconds each), the day is an unusually quiet one. The students are absent, like chalk erased from a blackboard, […]

It has been a while since I last wrote in this journal: there was glitch at the ubc site, and access was blocked, and, alas, I was also running around in headless chicken mode, so that is another reason for the lapse…. My son and I spent a night in Sapporo this weekend. We took […]

The sun has just come out of the clouds after a long, long hiatus. While snow has a brightness that is in some ways as blinding and as brilliant as the sun’s, ultimately living things have a bigger need for the sun and its power. The appearance of the sunlight brings the end to a […]

The dusty blues and greys of the sky, of the clouds, and of the buildings slowly dissolve into each other and in a few minutes all we see will become indistinguishable, except that trees turn blacker sooner than the rest of the world, at least now, right after sundown. (P.S. I returned from the bottom […]

A classic photo of Osaka city. This is a shot of America-mura, which (of course) has nothing to do with America at all.